Hi guys,

well as I will finish my PhD next month and start my LLM in the US soon it would be great to hear if someone has experience with the job prospects of LLM graduates with a PhD (and Bar exam). My PhD is in international finance law but from my home country Croatia. Now I will go for a general LLM in the US and then take the NY bar. I would like to work in academia but would also be fine with a big law firm as long as the sallary is fair. So if anyone was in a similar situation or has any relevant information it would be great to discuss this topic a bit.

1. The salary at a big law firm in the USA is likely much higher than in academia.
2. The LLM + NY Bar alone will not help you get a law firm job in the USA. You will need to bring something more to the table. Do you have client contacts in Croatia?
3. Why would you want to work in the USA anyway? The job and client market in the USA is ruthless. And, I hear that Croatia is a beautiful country.

Well the thing is, my dream job is a law profesor position and that is in croatia imposible to achive. I would go that far to say that it is more likely for someone like me to become law profesor at a top tier law school in the US then in any law school in croatia.Not because I have the delusion that I have some at least reasonable chances in the US but because the system in Croatia is still extremely closed and positions are sometimes distributed many years in advance so that there is no chance for a position to open in the next 5-8 years in the whole country. As it comes to law firm jobs I basically hope to earn some money, pay for the rest of my llm degree and save a decent amount of money to go back to croatia - however not excluding totaly that I would like it in the US and want to stay long term...

Croatia really is beautifull , especially the coastal part of it, however, with (real) unemplyment at 45% (when excluding the jobs in state administration, 65%) a anaul decrease of the economy in total and a non viable system where on each working person comes 0,7 retiered people, 1,5 unemloyed and 1 working in state administration, the job perspectives even for highly qualified people are not that great. Many good young lawyers work in law firms in their first two years for free to be able to take the bar. The average lawyers sallary is 900 euro for an avarage lawyer with 3-30 years of work experience in the field and the sallary rarely reaches more than 1500 euro/month even for highly skilled lawyers with 5-10 years of work experience in big law firms.Partner status is nearly imposible to achive as there are nearly no big law firms here and it is mostly a familly business with 5 lawyers per firm at maximum. The workload is naturally the same as in US Big law- 8-21 every day and most days 8-23 or even longer if a client neads something. The idea is: if I have to work like a maniac than at least for a reasonable sallary so that I can decide for myself in 5-7 xears where to go and what to do...

About special skills, well I speak french and a bit italian, have a degree in business mediation and 3 years work experience a croatian bar exam and a lot of international experience(Paris-Sorbonne and Rome). I am 29 years old and will have my phd before my 30th birthday. I however do not have any important clients waiting for me as I decided to move from practice into research a few years ago so that I could finish my phd.

Besides clients, what would you consider the strongest factors for law firms? How important is the school you have your basic degree/phd degree from? Have you better chances with a llm from for example Harvard than NYU or vice versa or is even the difference between harvard and a second tier school not that much of a deal? Do publications (articles/books) play any relevant role? And most important, what can be done shortly before and during the LLM to improve my chances?

Interesting background. Thanks for the explanation.
1. Always pick Harvard if you have the option.
2. Except for the fields of patent and tax law, your non-law degrees are largely irrelevant to US law firms. Another exception might be if you have a top-rated MBA and can network with classmates who work for potential clients.
3. If you want to work for a US law firm, I suggest you spend your free time developing US legal skills rather than diving into esoteric academic legal theories. Try to get an internship with a judge or law firm part-time. Or, volunteer with legal aid. Just do something to show US law firms that you are more than another foreign lawyer here for a year to get the NY Bar and then go back home.

Thanks for your input on this... I really appriciate hearing a second oppinion on this. Well I have no intention to take too much theoretical classes. I had enough of this in my basic law degree in Zagreb... I actually lean towards a concentration in (international) taxation as this is not to different from what I have done and obviouslly a area whit high demand...
Are you already in the USA or do you just go this year or apply now?

Columbia Law has a list of US law schools offering Visiting Assistant Professorships (VAPs), that is programs that allow young scholars to enter academia for up to 2 years and gain valuable experience in teaching and researching. Competition for this positions is harsh, since these are also well paid job opportunities. My suggestion is thus that you try to publish as much as possible (possibly good quality publications) on US law journals so as to maximize your chances to get one of these positions. Best of luck

I am sure that a place in such a program will be extremely compettitve. To publish in the US is something I will certainly try to do,but I am honestly not wery sure how my chances are to publish in us law jornals when I at the moment do not know too much about US law and I would doubt that they are interested in croatian banking law...
Also , do you have any idea how much law review articles we are talking about? I mean I have 4 articles published in france and croatia and in one year parallel to the llm I somehow doubt that I could write more than 2 articles of a good quality

There is no fixed number. It very much depends on the quality of your articles, which is sometimes measured according to the number of citations... Yale Law Journal is of course more prestigious than the U of Nowhere Law Review, peer-reviewed publications are usually better regarded than student-led journals, and so on

do you by any chance know a list where I can find peer reviewd law jornals in the US sort by relevance?

there should be more than one online. Since I do international public law, the journals I've in mind are likely to be different from those where you want to publish...